Condign Consequence

Pensacola News Journal, July 12:

"A man accidentally shot himself in the leg Friday evening in the Wal-Mart on Pensacola Boulevard south of West Nine Mile Road, authorities said. * * * The man, whose identity was not available Friday evening, had a concealed-weapon permit, and the weapon accidentally discharged, a Sheriff's Office dispatch supervisor said."

Feel safer, now, Walmart shoppers?

They Don't Shoot Lawyers... Do They?

From Linda Greenhouse, the great legal affairs reporter for the Times:

Despite the decision’s enormous symbolic significance, it was far from clear that [District of Columbia v. Heller] actually posed much of a threat to the most common gun regulations. Justice Scalia’s opinion applied explicitly just to “the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home,” and it had a number of significant qualifications.

“Nothing in our opinion,” he said, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

So, what's the point, then? As Adam Liptak explains, almost everyone agrees with New York's police commissioner Ray Kelly's comment:

[T]here’s no question about it that this decision will generate litigation throughout the country.”

Guns, Guns, More Guns

This month, for the third year in a row, Republicans in the Florida legislature passed a bill making it a crime for an employer to prohibit employees from bringing guns to work. If only the bill passes the state senate, we can all rest easy; the workplace will become safe hunting ground for the 26.2 percent of all Americans 18 or older who "suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year."

That's a whopping 57.7 million adults. And it doesn't even take into account the 80 Americans who die every day from gun violence. We shouldn't really count them. They were shot dead. Some of them probably were even guilty of something.

The "Shoot Up The Workplace" bill is one of those genius proposals of Northwest Florida representative Durrell Peaden, among others. Peaden apparently sees no more pressing need for improving life in Florida than to make the workplace in America a free fire zone.

Makes perfect sense. After all, where else are you more likely to want to kill someone? A recent Gallup poll found 77% of all Americans hate their jobs. As the blog at My Two Cents reasonably points out --

[I]f you have a hammer, all your problems look like nails.
If you have a gun, all your problems look like targets.

The bill is opposed by business interests "who think an employers' private property rights should be deemed at least as sacred as their employees' right to come to work armed." So it seems, as one south Florida newspaper editorialized, the debate is being framed as a clash between a Second Amendment right to carry guns versus a Fifth Amendment private property right.

What we'd like to know is why has the gun-lover's lobby stopped at undermining the Fifth Amendment? What weenies! Why not undermine Article I, Section 4 by prohibiting polling places from banning voter guns? Or, the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, by requiring that jurors carry guns?

Or that granddaddy of them all, the First Amendment? Let's make it a crime for churches to ban guns in the nave, the chancel, the entire sanctuary. And, cover Sunday School, too, and church-sponsored preschools.

Arm 'em to the teeth! After all, if guns are banned, only nuns and atheist kids will have guns!